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The Cloud Show with Magnus Mårtensson ft. Dr Greg Low - Ep. 11
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Oct 30, 2023
Join this live session with Magnus Mårtensson ft. Dr Greg Low for the next episode of The Cloud Show with Magnus Mårtensson on August 30, at 01:05 PM (EST). The show is about cloud leadership and all the important questions relating to cloud projects. Certainly, many matters when a company is going to and wants to be successful in the cloud, are about technology. However, there are many additional matters, adjacent to technology, that we also need to tend to regarding business strategy, human resources, organizational change, planning for a technical cloud approach, and many more questions. These conversations are critical for a healthy cloud and for a swift and accurate cloud approach. GUEST SPEAKER Dr Greg Low is a Member of the Microsoft Regional Director program that Microsoft describes as “150 of the world's top technology visionaries chosen specifically for their proven cross-platform expertise, community leadership, and commitment to business results”. Founder and principal consultant at SQL Down Under, a boutique data-related consultancy operating from Australia. A long-term data platform MVP. Well-known data community leader and public speaker at conferences worldwide. Pragmatic attitude to business transformation and to solving issues for businesses of all sizes. # Corner - Community of Software and Data Developers https://www.c-sharpcorner.com #CSharpCorner #TheCloudShow #CSharpTV
View Video Transcript
0:00
Hello, hello, and welcome again to the Cloud Show
0:03
There are so many topics that we want to talk about for cloud leaders and leaders in cloud projects
0:09
and there are so many things that we need to discuss and know about when it comes to a successful move to the cloud
0:16
We're going to specifically talk about that today, moving to the cloud
0:20
So probably most of you know that if you have some virtual machines already
0:25
you can move them to the cloud and run them there, and that will work just fine
0:30
We're going to talk about what makes it more than fine. What makes your business more than fine in the cloud is when you don't just migrate
0:38
you might also transform your business to be very suitable for running in the cloud
0:44
With me today, I have Dr. Greg Lowe, and we are going to talk about transformations today on the Cloud Show
1:00
Hello there, Greg. How are you? Hey, good thanks, Magnus. Yeah, yeah, it's nice to see you
1:08
And we are at some distance apart. I'm in Sweden and you're down under
1:14
Indeed. I actually loved the times I've spent in Sweden over the years
1:18
But, yeah, at the moment, I'm freezing in Melbourne. Oh, yeah, you have wintertime
1:23
I certainly have late summer over here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's been a bit cold here for my liking
1:29
So mind you, I don't think I'd like winters in Sweden either
1:33
No, you wouldn't. We don't either, but we live here anyway. So just to set the record straight, you started work for SQL Down Under
1:46
What's the story with the company? Yeah, look, I founded that a very long time ago, really
1:52
And look, I've always been a fan. I mean, I've done bits of work for other organizations and things
1:59
But generally I prefer to work for myself. You know, I think this is an industry where, you know, your life is often better
2:08
I think if you can take control of your own destiny and don't put your destiny in the hands of an organization
2:17
I mean, just yesterday, I was reading about, you know, say, friends from Microsoft that have been at the company, you know, more than 20 years
2:25
And all of a sudden, they're caught up in the force reduction. Yeah. You're preaching to the choirs there, mate. I'm with you as the expression goes, preaching to the choirs. So I like also working for myself. So you have your SQL down under and you do your business there. And you do a lot of, as everyone does these days, cloud business in terms of. Yeah. Look, initially we're pretty much focused more in the data side of things. But we were very early on
2:59
with Azure related things. And so, you know, I think I've made a point of staying across the vast majority of Azure
3:08
which is a tough call over the years. But there's certainly, it has come with that
3:15
even though I have a real passion in the application side, there comes, you need, you know, there's a lot I've needed to know
3:24
and make sure I knew about infrastructure areas, and particularly security areas or another area of strength
3:31
but just solutions in general. Okay, brilliant. Yeah. All right. So let's get to it
3:36
We wanted to talk today, or you said when I called you up on this
3:40
that, hey, can we talk about transformations? Yes, sure. So let's first define, right
3:47
We want to move our business to the cloud. We have some servers and things running our services
3:52
and whatever we have databases and things. We want to migrate them to the cloud and run them
3:56
That's brilliant. And then we want to make it better. Or do we want to make it better? Yeah
4:01
What's the transformation part? Where this comes from is there are a lot of the, I deal with a variety of organizations
4:11
So I have like startups at one end and tier one financials at the other end
4:16
And most of the financials I work with, I do do a bit of work with banks and things
4:20
But predominantly it's around what we call superannuation companies or people would
4:26
call retirement fund companies or, you know, those sorts of things. And what I've seen in a number
4:34
of organizations over recent years is that they've had sort of CTOs or people like that that have
4:43
been there in place a long time, you know, in many of these organizations. And then what we find
4:49
is suddenly they're gone and they get replaced by someone who comes
4:56
in talking about cloud transformation. Right. Right. And the boards, I must say, the board of the organization, I think here's those words
5:07
sounds like a wonderful thing. They think, I want some of that
5:11
Yeah, exactly. Because they hear it from everybody else around their business circles and they think this is something I need to do right But the sad thing that I see nearly all the time in these scenarios is that what the
5:27
companies do when they talk cloud transformation, but they tend to just pick up their
5:32
existing mess and migrate it to the cloud and somehow they think they've made a transformation
5:40
But they haven't actually transformed anything at all. And so what ends up, there's a number of things happen when you do that
5:50
The first thing is that it usually takes much longer than they've planned
5:54
because there are a number of things that end up being far more complicated
6:00
because they're trying to replicate what they were doing before, similarly in the cloud
6:07
And there are things about that that are quite different, right? So that's a problem
6:14
The second thing that tends to happen with this is that there is a mindset that says, look, what we'll do is we'll just migrate first and then we'll transform later
6:28
And this is one I hear again and again and again. The basic problem that tends to happen with that is that by the time the migration is completed, the company here
6:44
has gone through enormous pain, grief and agony making that migration occur
6:50
It's ended up taking far longer than they planned. It's ended up costing way more than they had planned
6:59
And they have really almost burnt out by the time they've done that
7:04
And worse, all of the budget that they were talking about using for doing the transformation work has gone
7:14
Now it's too late to go back, right? Now you go back
7:19
And they have this, what they now have is a worse implementation in many cases of what they
7:27
used to have but now hosted somewhere else. Now, there are positive things there because in some cases their infrastructure has been
7:37
so old and they've been holding off upgrading it and things like that
7:42
And so getting off that old infrastructure, I can't say that's a bad thing
7:47
In many cases, it's a positive thing. But, you know, there's very little beyond that
7:55
And the other thing that usually surprises them is that many of the applications that they have work incredibly poorly when they pick them up and move them to the cloud
8:07
And again, it's because so many of the applications are designed to be incredibly cheap
8:11
chatty and things like that. And the minute you introduce some latency or things like that into a cloud
8:19
that's a problem, right? And so you see applications that, you know, used to take, I don't know
8:26
I see an overnight processing recently at a bank that in their on-premises version
8:31
used to take two and a half hours. You know, when they first migrated to the cloud with what they thought were four times
8:39
the amount of resources that they had on premises. It was now running over 12 hours
8:46
And this is using the same application. Now clearly, a big part of what we spend our life doing
8:54
is helping them change those applications so that that doesn't happen. But just picking it up and moving it there is problematic
9:04
And as I said, I think chatiness is a really, really important one in that
9:09
But there are many, many other scenarios as well. There's no guarantee that what you had before will be well suited to run well in the cloud
9:19
There can be examples of things like workloads that work very nicely in the cloud
9:23
You just take them and move them. And it gets better. I mean, it's better than before
9:29
It's not worse. You got rid of the old hardware and all that stuff
9:34
And now you're using someone else's hardware and they maintain that. And it's actually cheaper, by the way
9:40
So, yeah, okay, we're doing all right. And then, of course, there can be horror stories
9:43
Like, it's just way worse now. Absolutely. And this is a big problem
9:48
But for me, the people I'm mostly concerned about are the end users, right
9:54
Because if you look at it from the business users point of view, when you do that, all they see is a massive disruption to their life
10:04
Of course. They have so many things that have periods where they do or don't work and so on during the migration
10:12
they go through a mess and in the end, often at best, they're back where they started
10:18
Yeah, or worse off. And so the users are sitting there saying, what was that all about
10:23
Yeah, exactly. Right? And they literally don't see that there was any point to this pain that they've just gone through
10:30
Correct. I'm fully with you there on that. I agree entirely. So what do we do instead
10:37
Let talk transformation Yeah So look there different layers to the transformation but one of the things that I think is incredibly important is obviously that you choose which things to migrate and in the right way
10:52
And you replace things that are not good candidates for migration, right
10:57
And you've got to categorize things appropriately as to what moves and what doesn't
11:01
But to me, a big thing that you need to do is make sure that early on in the process, you tackle something that will make the situation for the end users better
11:13
And so you do something in that process that's going to make them smile early on in the process
11:23
Because they are going to go through and have to suffer things along the way
11:27
You want them to see a light at the other end that says, this is a good thing
11:31
for the business, right? That's super important. Also, there's other aspects to this
11:39
I mean, if all you do, for example, in the case of databases and things is pick them up
11:45
that are running on VMs and stick them running in VMs in the cloud, well, what exactly
11:50
have you done except you probably now have VMs with poorer I.O. and so on characteristics
11:56
than what you started with, right? So the thing is that's not the best way of doing
12:01
There are many, many other options for running databases in the cloud than on the end
12:07
Yeah, and so the thing I look at in the case of those things is that you really want to move to a situation where from the IT people point of view, you do improve the situation
12:20
And so I look at things like in the case of SQL server, for example, I mean, we can run SQL server on a VM
12:27
I can run a SQL server managed instance. I can run an Azure SQL database and so on
12:36
If I end up doing anything except an Azure SQL database, I feel like I have failed
12:44
Because I want to get the company to a point where that's how they run, right
12:50
Like, I mean, I look at our own databases. And years and years ago, I cannot tell you the number of times I used to have to do
12:57
things to keep them running and stuff like that. From the minute I moved our own databases to
13:03
Azure SQL database, I have never thought about those databases again. Exactly. No pasting
13:10
no maintaining, no upgrading, no emptying logs, nothing. This has to happen, right? And so
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this, but the thing is, it won't happen just, you know, without a little bit of pain in amongst
13:22
there, right? Yeah. And there should be a silver line. There should be a trophy at the end of the
13:27
rainbow or something like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look, and I blame Microsoft on this one too, because
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if you look at the, from the point of view of the cloud vendor, what they're interested in is
13:39
getting you migrated onto their infrastructure as quickly as possible. Yes. And as friction-free
13:45
as possible, they don't really want to talk too much about transformation on the way. So in the
13:53
case of a SQL server workload, they will move you, for example, onto a SQL
13:57
managed instance. Now, cost-wise, to me, there are very few clients for whom that makes sense
14:06
right? However, if you look at why they move them there, it's because there are things like
14:12
agent jobs and, I don't know, service broker and SQL CLR. There's certain things that don't work
14:20
in Azure SQL database, in the pure platform service, as opposed to this sort of hybrid type
14:27
But those are few scenarios. That's right. And there's very few of them
14:31
Yeah. And there are better solutions. Yeah. Yeah, there's better solutions for those same things
14:37
So you need to sort of stop and say, hang on. You know, let's do the work to make that work
14:44
And then the whole thing is better off. And will cost us far less going forward
14:49
So that's the information that you're alluding to. You have to take some care to see, okay, our database from on-prem
14:57
does not, and the application calling that database does not work exactly using the, for example
15:03
platform service database offering. But that would be the best target for us to have
15:08
So it will transform the thing we had so that it works the best possible
15:15
Yeah. Whereas if you look at the typical tooling and everything that comes from Microsoft or the vendors who are the cloud service and so on
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what they will look at doing is doing the least friction migration for you with a discussion that
15:34
sometime down the track you might do the transformation work. But the thing is that we know that never
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happens. And so what you end up is stuck on something that ends up costing a lot more than what
15:48
you were thinking. I agree with that. But just to complete the picture, there are scenarios
15:53
few of them, but they exist where you kind of have to do it that way
15:58
You must leave for example you have a contract with a with a hosting provider about 10 or you have some other reason that is a real reason why we must pick up our things and huddle really
16:12
really quickly. Just move over to the cloud and put it there and it's working
16:17
The number one culprits in this are the software vendors, the ISVs
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Oh, yeah. So, for example, I had a client a little while ago, went to, you know, a new accounting
16:28
system and they were saying, hey, how can we run this? And the vendor, of course, had not tested any
16:35
other options. And all they say to them is, you need to install it on a VM. Because that's the
16:42
only thing the vendor knows. And so this is another thing I really want Microsoft to do is to get
16:50
stronger in outreach to the software vendors. Because they are the ones that will often end up
16:56
blocking the transformation. But the other one that I do want to throw in while we're sort of talking about
17:03
these things, the other really big one for me is identity. I still see far too many applications that manage all their own identity and so on
17:12
And again, they get picked up and dragged into the cloud. And then you still have all of these little pockets of identity and so on
17:19
That's a classic example where you need to clean up your whole identity story
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because in the end you're in a much stronger situation. And when I'm dealing with like large financials
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it horrifies me to see them all still, you know, doing their own authentication system
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Things like this, this is not good. And things like that. Yeah
17:41
No, I get it. That's a real pain. I agree with that. So if we want to kind of sum up this story here
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what should a company do to, to make a plan for transformation, what do you do differently than just taking the advice of the platform vendor and says
18:02
hey, we can use this migration with it. It's really cool because it'll just migrate things and it will be so painless
18:08
First of all, it's not so painless. Not all the time. Second, yeah, sure, it works. It's good in the cloud, but it can be great
18:16
So how do you make a plan for a great transformation story
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Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work to it. No question at all
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But I think the important thing is as part of that planning, you need to lay out the order in
18:32
which you're going to do things. And clearly there are applications that will pick up and move with almost no effort at all
18:39
There are applications that will take some effort to move. There are other applications that will be incredibly painful
18:48
And you need to potentially bite the bullet and say, maybe we will move those
18:54
but they're going to be the first ones replaced. You know, so we need to have a scheme where they get replaced
19:00
What does concern me is I see a lot of organizations who think cloud computing
19:05
is just VMs running in the cloud, right? Now, you know, at some level, pretty much everything in the cloud is
19:12
but the thing is from the user's point of view, it's not just all VMs, right
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It's something that the AWS people around here in Australia have done a wonderful job of, you know, early on
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They, no, no, no, they went to enterprises and they just sold them tons and tons and tons of VM resources
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And so there's a whole pile of clients who the only thing they ever think of when they think about cloud is how do I make it run on those AWS VMs that I've already pre-purchase
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That's a shame. That's where Microsoft actually started on the other end of that spectrum, saying the only thing we have is a platform offering
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You cannot have any help. And then, of course, they gave people a VM later because the market demanded it because of what you just said, right
19:58
Some people just see, they only know a VM. And when you only know a VM, you can't be faulted for it
20:04
So this is a lot about knowledge and understanding what else could I be doing, which is not a traditional idea
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A final one I'd throw in the mix here, too, is transformation of the IT team itself
20:16
You know, the far too many on-premises IT teams still haven't embraced like infrastructure as code or, you know, these sorts of concepts
20:28
They're still in there provisioning, you know, they still, when they get to the cloud, they go in there and they start provisioning VMs manually and configuring the VMs manually and so on
20:40
You know, that needs to be an early part of the whole process
20:44
Yes. Those people need to learn. That is not the way to do it anymore
20:49
Absolutely. That's brilliant. So you have to focus on those skills and upskill and figure out what team composition
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and what people is it that you actually do. But as I said, early on, focus on something that will make you use as smart
21:02
Yeah. That's a good, solid tip. And we'll let that be the final word
21:07
Thank you so much for being on the Cloud Show today, Dr. Greg. Brilliant to have you with us
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And I'll see you around somewhere soon, hopefully. I'm sure you will
21:16
Bye, bye, everyone
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